Deep Ecology

I was born a thousand years ago, born in the culture of bows
and arrows ... born in an age when people loved the things of
nature and spoke to it as though it had a soul. -- Chief Dan George

The woods were formerly temples of the deities, and even now
simple country folk dedicate a tall tree to a God with the ritual
of olden times; and we adore sacred groves and the very silence
that reigns in them no less devoutly than images that gleam in
gold and ivory. -- Pliny

In the stillness of the mighty woods, man is made aware of the
divine. -- Richard St Barbe Baker

There is no better way to please the Buddha than to please all
sentient beings. -- Ladakhi saying

Every social transformation ... has rested on a new
metaphysical and ideological base; or rather, upon deeper
stirrings and intuitions whose rationalised expression takes the
form of a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of man. --
Lewis Mumford

... there is reason to hope that the ecology-based revitalist
movements of the future will seek to achieve their ends in the
true Gandhian tradition. It could be that Deep Ecology, with its
ethical and metaphysical preoccupations, might well develop into
such a movement. -- Edward Goldsmith

The main hope for changing humanity's present course may lie
... in the development of a world view drawn partly from
ecological principles - in the so-called deep ecology
movement. -- Paul Ehrlich

The religious behaviour of man contributes to maintaining the
sanctity of the world. -- Mircea Eliade

The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess coined the phrase
deep ecology to describe deep ecological
awareness. Deep ecology is the foundation of a branch of
philosophy known as ecophilosophy, Arne Naess
prefers the term ecosophy, that deals with the
ethics of Gaia.

Fritjof Capra defined deep ecology by contrasting it with shallow
ecology and showing that it is a network concept:

Shallow ecology in anthropocentric, or human-centred. It views
humans as above or outside of nature, as the source of all value,
and ascribes only instrumental, or 'use', value to nature. Deep
ecology does not separate humans - or anything else - from the
natural environment. It does see the world not as a collection of
isolated objects but as a network of phenomena that are
fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. Deep ecology
recognizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and views
human beings as just one particular strand in the web of life.

Arne Naess was strongly influenced by Baruch Spinoza and Mahatma
Gandhi. Self-realisation is in the sense used by Gandhi.

Mahatma Gandhi gave meaning to Self-realisation in various
contexts: 'Life is an aspiration, Its mission is to strive after
perfection, which is self-realisation'; commenting on the
Bhagavad Gita 'Man is not at peace with himself till
he has become like unto God. The endeavour to reach this state is
the supreme, the only ambition worth having. And this is
self-realisation. This self-realisation is the subject of the
Gita, as it is of all scriptures ... to be a real
devotee is to realise oneself. Self-realisation is not something
apart.' As Arne Naess notes for Gandhi '"To realise God," "to
realise the Self" and "to realise the Truth" are three
expressions of the same development.'

Arne Naess on the influence of Gandhi:

As a student and admirer since 1930 of Gandhi's non-violent
direct actions in bloody conflicts, I am inevitably influenced by
his metaphysics which to him personally furnished tremendously
powerful motivation and which contributed to keeping him going
until his death. His supreme aim was not India's political
liberation. He led a crusade against extreme poverty, caste
suppression, and against terror in the name of religion. The
crusade was necessary, but the liberation of the individual human
being was his supreme aim. It is strange for many to listen to
what he himself said about this ultimate goal:

What I want to achieve - what I have been striving and pining
to achieve these thirty years - is self-realization, to see God
face to face, to attain Moksha (Liberation). I live and move and
have my being in pursuit of that gaol. All that I do by way of
speaking and writing, and all my ventures in the political field,
are directed to this same end.

Arne Naess on Spinoza, Self-realisation and the link with Gandhi:

Does Spinoza think of the sage as a meditative rather than
socially and otherwise active person? ...

My main argument is ... inspired by ... variety of Mahayana
Buddhism ... The teaching that the further along the path to
supreme levels of freedom a human being proceeds, the greater the
identification and compassion and therefore the greater the
effort to help others along the same path. This implies activity
of social and political relevance. Gandhi, considering Buddhism
to be a reformed Hinduism, furnishes a good example. His mistakes
were many, but he tried through meditation of sorts (combined
with fasting) to improve the quality of his action, especially
the consistency in maintaining a broad and lofty perspective. He
deplored the followers in his ashrams who spurned outward action
and concentrated on metaphysics, meditation, and fasting. He
conceived that as a kind of spiritual egotism. He did not
recognise yoga, the meditation and prayer as an adequate
way to insight, perfection and freedom. Advance towards the
highest levels require interaction with the terrifying
complexities of social life.

In a formal study of Spinoza, Naess notes that 'the opposite of
the process of self-realization we give ... the name "alienation"'.

Camped out in Death Valley, California, during 1984, George
Sessions and Arne Naess draw up eight basic principles that
describe deep ecology:

The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman
life on Earth have value in themselves. These values are
independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for
human purposes.

Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the
realisation of these values and are also values in
themselves.

Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity
accept to satisfy vital needs.

The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible
with a substantial decrease of the human population. The
flourishing of nonhuman life demands such a decrease.

Present human interference with the nonhuman world is
excessive, and the situation is rapidly rapidly worsening.

Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect
basic economic, technological, and ideological structures.
The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from
the present.

The ideological change is mainly in appreciating life
quality rather than adhering to to an increasingly
higher standard of living. There will be a profound
awareness of the difference between big and great.

Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an
obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the
necessary change.

Wilderness, especially deserts, have a special place in
communicating spiritual wisdom to man. Moses carried the Ten
Commandments down from a mountainside, Buddha received
enlightenment whilst meditating under a tree, John the Baptist
carried out his baptisms in the River Jordan, Jesus Christ
formulated his basic tenets whilst wandering in the desert,
Henry David Thoreau camped out
for two years in a wooden hut on the north side of Walden Pond,
George Sessions and Arne Naess drew up the eight principles of
deep ecology whist camped out in Death Valley.

Without a wilderness to retreat to we will lose a place of
contemplation, a place from which we can draw deep spiritual
wisdom.

The Sea of Galilee is where Christ walked on water to go to the
rescue of stricken disciples. It is a place of peace and
solitude, a place of reverence, a place where pilgrims go. There
are plans to turn the assumed spot into a major tourist
attraction. A bridge will be built just under the surface of the
waves so that tourist can be photographed 'walking on water'.
Lands End, a wild and windy place at the most western end of
Cornwall, had a tourist attraction built, paths manicured, car
parks built. Tintagel, allegedly the birth place of King Arthur,
was probably once an attractive place, now it has tacky tourist
shops selling even tackier gifts, King Arthur's filling station.

Deep ecology is consistent with a network, Gaian, ecological
world-view. It arises naturally from the network structure of
life, from the Gaian hierarchical order. Its ethics enables man
to behave homeotelically towards the Gain order.

Arne Naess:

Care flows naturally if the 'self' is widened and deepened so
that protection of free Nature is felt and conceived as
protection of ourselves ... Just as we need no morals to make us
breathe ... [so] if your 'self' in the wide sense embraces
another being, you need no moral exhortation to show care ... You
care for yourself without feeling any moral pressure to do it ...
If reality is like it is experienced by the ecological self, our
behaviour naturally and beautifully follows norms of
strict environmental ethics.

If we acquire deep ecological awareness we become intuitively
aware, ineffable knowledge, tribal wisdom, as Fritjof Capra says
'the connection between an ecological perception of the world and
corresponding behaviour is not a logical but a
psychological connection':

Logic does not lead us from the fact that we are an integral
part of the web of life to certain norms of how we should live.
However if we have deep ecological awareness, or experience, of
being part of the web of life, then we will (as opposed to
should) be inclined to care for all living nature. Indeed,
we can scarcely refrain from responding in this way.

Wendell Berry:

People need more than to understand their obligations to one
another and to earth; they also need the feelings of such
obligations.

As Arne Naess says 'The essence of deep ecology is to ask deeper
questions.' It is only by asking deep questions of today's
industrialised, growth-oriented, greedy, materialistic society
that we will force a paradigm shift. To concentrate not on
simple Cartesian solutions to the causes of pollution, but to
probe ever deeper to obtain a holistic view.

In the view of Arne Naess to ask deep questions is to lead to
philosophy:

Persistent why's and how's lead to philosophy ... Every
why- and how- string leads to philosophy.

In the movement instigated largely through the efforts of
Rachel Carson and her friends, the 'unecological' policies of
industrial nations were sharply criticized. The foundation
of the criticism was not pollution, waste of resources and
disharmony between population and production rate in
non-industrialized nations. The foundation rested on answers to
deeper questions of 'why?' and 'how?'. Consequently the
recommended policies also touched fundamentals such as man's
attitude towards nature, industrial man's attitude towards
non-industrial cultures, and the ecological aspects of widely
different economic systems.

Medieval historian Lynn White illustrates the failure of the
shallow approach to ecological problems and the need for a deep
ethical dimension:

I have not discovered anyone who publicly advocates pollution.
Everybody says that he is against it. Yet the crisis deepens
because all specific measures to remedy it are either undercut by
'legitimate' interest groups, or demands kinds of regional
cooperation for which our political system does not provide. We
deserve our increasing pollution because, according to our
structure of values, so many other things have priority over
achieving a viable ecology. ... our structure of values ... is
deep rooted in us ... Until it is eradicated not only from our
minds but also from our emotions, we shall doubtless be unable to
make fundamental changes in our attitudes and actions affecting
ecology.

To probe deeper is to strip away the outer reality. It has close
parallels with subatomic physics and the inner world of deep
meditation. As with Buddhism, the inner reality is to achieve
oneness with all reality.

Arne Naess, born 1912, is Norway's leading philosopher. No ivory
tower academic, Arne Naess is more than happy to put his
principles into action by joining an environmental demonstration.

Erik Dammann:

As we have seen, a number of academics in several countries
have already given up their elite positions in order to make
their knowledge available to [grassroots] movements and to use
their analytical faculties in investigating the possibilities for
action on the movements' premises. A Norwegian example is the
philosopher Arne Naess who gave up his professorship and emerged
from academic isolation in order to be freer to participate in
the multitude of popular campaigns for ecology and social change.
His fearless action has added weight to these campaigns, and the
well-known picture of the internationally renowned professor
calmly being carried away by the police from the protest camp at
Mardola has certainly given many good citizens a new
understanding that activists are not only 'hysterical
extremists'. His books, especially Ecology, Society and
Life-style, have without doubt strengthened many of the more
intellectually oriented campaigners in their understanding of
such things as the importance of a holistic approach and of value
priorities.

The Alta Confrontation, that took place in northern Norway, 14
January 1981, was the largest protest ever seen in Norway, when
large numbers of Lapps, joined by lawyers, academics, chained
themselves together to protest at the construction of large-scale
dam and power generation project. 600 police confronted more than
1,000 demonstrators. Arne Naess was one of the protesters who
had to be cut free.

During WWII Arne Naess was an active participant in the
nonviolent resistance to Nazi occupation. In the post-war years
he was involved in the peace movement, then later in the ecology
movement. Arne Naess resigned his chair of philosophy at the
University of Oslo in 1969 to enable him to take a more activist
role, or as he put it because he 'wanted to live rather than
function'. Arne Naess's ecophilosophical work dates from the
resignation of his professorship in 1969.

George Sessions and Bill Devall were the first to recognise the
value of the work of Arne Naess, and it was their heavy promotion
that brought Naess to international attention.

Sessions writing of Devall gives an idea of the ecological
commitment:

Bill put his deep ecology commitment into practice. He
practices 'living in place' with a very low-entropy, low
consumption life style. For the last ten years, Bill has worked
relentlessly with environmental organisations and individually to
save the Siskiyous redwoods, Humboldt Bay and seacoast, and the
entire North Coast area from further degradation from US Forest
Service, the timbering companies, developers, and others. He was
largely instrumental in setting up the Northcoast Environmental
Centre, a coalition of environmental groups (Sierra Club,
Audubon, Friends of the Earth, Friends of the River, etc.) and a
model of its kind. Bill is a frequent contributor to Econews
(Newsletter of the Northeast Environmental Center).

Deep ecology had deep roots before Arne Naess gave the philosophy
coherence by coining the phrase and providing a formal framework.

George Sessions:

The philosophical roots of the Deep Ecology movement are found
in the ecocentrism and social criticisms of Henry David Thoreau,
John Muir, D H Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers and Aldous Huxley.
Influential ecological/social criticism has been derived also
from the writings of George Orwell and Theodore Roszak, and from
the critiques of the problems created by the rise of
civilizations written by the maverick historian Lewis Mumford.
Further inspiration for contemporary ecological consciousness and
the Deep Ecology movement can be traced to ecocentric religions
and the ways of life of primal peoples around the world, and to
Taoism, Saint Francis of Assisi, the Romantic Nature-oriented
counterculture of the nineteenth century with its roots in
Spinoza, and the Zen Buddhism of Alan Watts and Gary Snyder.

Lynn White, who was highly critical of Christianity's role in
today's ecological crisis 'Christianity bears a huge burden of
guilt', saw the solution lay beyond the technological dimension
and involved addressing the spiritual or ethical dimension, the
position vis-a-vis man versus nature and his right to exploit:

What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the
man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not
going to get us out of the present ecological crisis until we
find a new religion, or rethink our old one ... We shall continue
to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the
Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence other
than to serve man ... Since the roots of our trouble are so
largely religious, the remedy must be essentially religious
whether we call it that or not.

More recently Christian Theologians and Biblical scholars,
Father Robert Murray, Margaret Barker, Vincent Rossi, have begun
to question the traditional Biblical interpretation
that Man was
granted dominion over all God's creatures, ie granted the absolute right to
exploit, and that instead there was a Cosmic Covenant and that Man's
role was to help maintain the cosmic order for all of God's
Creation. An interpretation that would have been recognisable to
St Ephrem the Syrian, St Dionysius the Areopagite, St Maximus the Confessor,
Hildegard von Bingen and forms the world-view of vernacular man and
chthonic societies. Organisations like ARC and
REEP are
attempting to reconnect mainstream religions with their environment.

Isaiah 24:4-6:

The earth mourns and withers,
the world languishes and withers;
the heavens languish together with the earth.
The earth lies polluted
under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed the laws,
violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant.
Therefore a curse devours the earth,
and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt;
therefore the inhabitants of the earth are scorched,
and few men are left.

In vernacular societies, spirituality and awareness of the
natural world is part of everyday existence.

The mountainous region of Ladakh has a Tibetan culture. Helena
Norberg-Hodge, who has spent some time living in Ladakh,
describes the planting of seed at the start of the season, before
the seed is planted an astrologer is consulted to pick the right
day and the person with the right sign to sow the first seed:

Next, the spirits of the earth and water - the sadak and the
Ihu - must be pacified: the worms of the soil, the fish of the
streams, the soul of the land. They can easily be angered; the
turning of a spade, the breaking of stones, even walking on the
ground above them can upset their peace. Before sowing, a feast
is prepared in their honour. For an entire day a group of monks
recite prayers; no one eats meat or drinks chang (the local
barley brew). In a cluster of trees at the edge of the village,
where a small mound of clay bricks has been built for the
spirits, milk is offered. As the sun sets, other offerings are
thrown into the stream.

[next day] ... As the sun appears, the whole family gathers.
Two men carry the wooden plough; ahead a pair of massive dzo
dwarf the children who lead them. Work and festivity are one.
People drink chang from silver-lined cups, and the air hums with
the sounds of celebration. A monk in robes of deep maroon chants
a sacred text; laughter and song drift back and forth from field
to field. The ravages of winter are over.

Before technology and Big Business took over and Western farming
degenerated into little more than strip mining of agriculture
land, Western farmers had the same empathy with their land. The
soil and all that grew in it were treated with reverence, the
farmers' role was to improve the land through his understanding of
the natural world, to work with Nature not against, the
harvest was a time for enjoyment and merriment; now the soil, the
plants, the animals, the landscape, those who toil on the land,
are assets to be used and abused as the market dictates.

The emergence of deep ecology and its coincidence with the
emergence of radical movements of the 1960s, and the way it has
given these movements a spiritual/ethical dimension, and added to
their radicalisation, is a pointer to the future direction.

George Sessions:

The long-range Deep Ecology movement emerged more or less
spontaneously and informally as a philosophical and scientific
social/political movement during the so-called Ecological
Revolution of the 1960s. Its main concern has been to bring about
a major paradigm shift - a shift in perception, values, and
lifestyles - as a basis for redirecting the ecologically
destructive path of modern industrial growth societies. Since the
1960s, the long-range Deep Ecology movement has been
characterised philosophically by a move from anthropocentrism to
ecocentrism, and by environmental activism.

Paul Ehrlich sees deep ecology as the way forward:

The main hope for changing humanity's present course may lie
... in the development of a world view drawn partly from
ecological principles - in the so-called deep ecology movement.
The term 'deep ecology' was coined in 1972 by Arne Naess of the
University of Oslo to contrast with the fight against pollution
and resource depletion in developed countries, which he called
'shallow ecology'. The deep ecology movement thinks today's human
thought patterns and and social organization are inadequate to
deal with the population-resource-environmental crisis - a view
with which I tend to agree. Within the movement disagreement
abounds, but most of its adherents favour a much less
anthropocentric, more egalitarian world, with greater emphasis on
empathy and less on scientific rationality.

I am convinced that such a quasi-religious movement, one
concerned with the need to change the values that now govern much
of human activity, is essential to the persistence of our
civilization.

Fritjof Capra also sees deep ecology as the way forward:

The new vision of reality is an ecological vision in a sense
which goes far beyond the immediate concerns with environmental
protection. To emphasise this deeper meaning of ecology,
philosophers and scientists have begun to make a distinction
between 'deep ecology' and 'shallow environmentalism'. Whereas
shallow environmentalism is concerned with more efficient control
and management of the natural environment for the benefit of
'man', the deep ecology movement recognizes that ecological
balance will require profound changes in our perception of the
role of human beings in the planetary ecosystem. In short, it
will require a new philosophical and religious basis.

Deep ecology is supported by modern science, and in particular
by the new systems approach, but it is rooted in a perception of
reality that goes beyond the scientific framework to an intuitive
awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its
multiple manifestations and its cycles of change and
transformation. When the concept of the human spirit is
understood in this sense, as the mode of consciousness in which
the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole, it
becomes clear that ecological awareness is truly spiritual.
Indeed, the idea of the individual being linked to the cosmos is
expressed in the Latin root of the word religion, religare ('to
bind strongly'), as well as the Sanskrit yoga, which means
union.

The one movement that has adopted Deep Ecology in its entirety is
Earth First! Spawned out of a
disillusionment with traditional ecological campaigns, they
recognised the value of nature for its own intrinsic self, the
need to value all communities, including human communities, the
need for biodiversity. They have successfully adopted the
tactics of the civil rights and peace movements and use
direct action to further their aims.
Their structure lacks structure, small, self-contained,
semi-autonomous units, with loose network structures forming the
whole. Capital and Big Business, being
by their very nature anti-Nature, are seen as the ultimate enemy.
Earth First! are the
Jesuits of Deep Ecology.

Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!:

Earth First! has led the effort to reframe the question of
wilderness preservation from an aesthetic and utilitarian one to
an ecological one, from a focus on scenery and recreation to a
focus on biological diversity.

Similarly, we have gone beyond the agenda of mainstream
conservation groups to protect a portion of the remaining
wilderness by calling for the reintroduction of extirpated
species and the restoration of vast wilderness tracts. We have
brought the discussion of biocentric philosophy - Deep Ecology - out of
dusty academic journals. We have effectively introduced
nonviolent civil disobedience into the repertoire of wildlife
preservation activism. We have also helped to jolt the
conservation movement out of its middle-age lethargy, and
re-inspire it with passion, joy, and humor. In doing all of this,
Earth First! has restructured the conservation spectrum and
redefined the parameters of debate on ecological matters.

Warwick Fox has attempted to address what he sees as fundamental
flaws in deep ecology and extend it by what he calls
transpersonal ecology (trans in this context meaning transcend).

For growing numbers of converts, deep ecology is the religion of
the new millennium, the new ethics, the new morality, a return to
the chthonic world-view of vernacular man, part of the paradigm
shift to a new ecological world-view.